Celestica International Inc. on Tuesday will release what executives described as its most significant brand overhaul since 2007, positioning the electronics manufacturing services firm as the enabler of innovation among companies from its native Canada to Silicon Valley.

The rebranding includes a new logo that says goodbye to the flaming red comet that has served as Celestica’s most familiar image. In its place is a “C” made up of small red circles that suggest a group of components, around which are even smaller grey circles that explode into a star-like pattern.

Beyond the logo, however, is a series of brand elements that include a mission statement describing Celestica as a company that “enables the world’s best brands” by solving technology challenges, and attributes such as “driven,” “informed” and “bold.”

In an exclusive interview with B2B News Network prior to the reveal of its latest brand identity, Celestica CEO Rob Mionis said the work partly reflects his own attitude towards the company before he joined it about two years ago.

“Celestica was a supplier of mine back in the day and I always viewed it as operating underneath the radar. I would have described it as an experiential brand — to know them was to love them, but I never viewed them as being overly prominent in the market,” he said. “I thought the market didn’t appreciate the insight that we provide, or the opportunity we provide to help our customers with the ability to unlock their full potential.”

Part of the challenge of marketing a B2B brand like Celestica is that its work is deliberately behind the scenes, Mionis said. However the results of the company’s engineering and other talent ensure flights take off and land safely, or that dangerous lead is removed from electronics, for example.

“We are a very strong partner — in our business we’re not really just a supplier but an extension of (our customers’) organization,” he said. “We’re helping people to move quicker, to be more agile and to tackle those higher-complexity challenges.”

Though it’s not about to start running Super Bowl ads, Mionis said the brand relaunch will also mark the start of more activity from Celestica across social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter and even Facebook. He pointed to firms like GE and customers like Cisco (“They have this great message of technology optimism”) as examples of other B2B brands that are managing to stand out and remain relevant.

Internally, Mionis said Celestica has held “spirit days” where employees created videos and participated in other events to help them better understand and contribute their own personal stories about the new brand. The values and other attributes that have been done as part of this effort will also be fed into Celestica’s performance management system, he added.

Celestica is also recognizing it needs to be closer to the next generation of customers in the technology space. Earlier this year, for instance, Mionis published a blog post about the launch of the firm’s Customer Experience Center in Santa Clara, Calif. While most of the interest in startups tends to focus on software development, Mionis pointed out that many of the most successful applications require some kind of high-performance infrastructure to run on, which is where Celestica’s manufacturing and engineering track record becomes relevant, he said.

Shane Schick

Shane Schick is the Editor-in-Chief of B2B News Network. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of Marketing magazine and has also been Vice-President, Content & Community (Editor-in-Chief), at IT World Canada, a technology columnist with the Globe and Mail and was the founding editor of ITBusiness.ca.
Shane has been recognized for journalistic excellence by the Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance and the Canadian Online Publishing Awards.